slab: document SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU

Explain this SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU thing...

[hugh@veritas.com: add a pointer to comment in mm/slab.c]
Signed-off-by: Peter Zijlstra <a.p.zijlstra@chello.nl>
Acked-by: Jens Axboe <jens.axboe@oracle.com>
Acked-by: Paul E. McKenney <paulmck@linux.vnet.ibm.com>
Acked-by: Christoph Lameter <cl@linux-foundation.org>
Signed-off-by: Hugh Dickins <hugh@veritas.com>
Signed-off-by: Pekka Enberg <penberg@cs.helsinki.fi>
This commit is contained in:
Peter Zijlstra 2008-11-13 20:40:12 +02:00 committed by Pekka Enberg
parent 02f5621042
commit d7de4c1dc3

View file

@ -23,6 +23,34 @@
#define SLAB_CACHE_DMA 0x00004000UL /* Use GFP_DMA memory */
#define SLAB_STORE_USER 0x00010000UL /* DEBUG: Store the last owner for bug hunting */
#define SLAB_PANIC 0x00040000UL /* Panic if kmem_cache_create() fails */
/*
* SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU - **WARNING** READ THIS!
*
* This delays freeing the SLAB page by a grace period, it does _NOT_
* delay object freeing. This means that if you do kmem_cache_free()
* that memory location is free to be reused at any time. Thus it may
* be possible to see another object there in the same RCU grace period.
*
* This feature only ensures the memory location backing the object
* stays valid, the trick to using this is relying on an independent
* object validation pass. Something like:
*
* rcu_read_lock()
* again:
* obj = lockless_lookup(key);
* if (obj) {
* if (!try_get_ref(obj)) // might fail for free objects
* goto again;
*
* if (obj->key != key) { // not the object we expected
* put_ref(obj);
* goto again;
* }
* }
* rcu_read_unlock();
*
* See also the comment on struct slab_rcu in mm/slab.c.
*/
#define SLAB_DESTROY_BY_RCU 0x00080000UL /* Defer freeing slabs to RCU */
#define SLAB_MEM_SPREAD 0x00100000UL /* Spread some memory over cpuset */
#define SLAB_TRACE 0x00200000UL /* Trace allocations and frees */